Review of "Water Lilies"

Allusions to Monet may provide a prettier picture, but consider that the original French title of the film Water Lilies is Naissance des Pieuvres — which translates to "birth of the octopuses," those eight-armed geniuses of aquatic camouflage that are genetically programmed to die after they reproduce. Association with such a dark fate might explain the anxiety and awkwardness that engulfs three French girls on the cusp of adult sexualities in this new film by out lesbian director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma.

Water Lilies delivers a vivid impression of Euro-teen angst set against the backdrop of competitive synchronized swimming in the Paris suburb of Cergy. My French friend who spent her childhood near this ville nouvelle built in the 1960s noted Cergy's weird but cool modern architecture and its greenery unfortunately surrounded by too much concrete.

In other words, Cergy sounds like the ideal location for Sciamma's warm-weather tale of 15-year-olds overwhelmed by the prospect of their biological destinies and the confusing novelty of their desires. Their growing pains unfold in a world almost completely devoid of adult characters (not to mention the riots that touched this Paris banlieue in real life last year).

As a result of this teenage perspective, some might think of Water Lilies as My Summer of Love blended with Fat Girls, spiced with a dash of The Virgin Suicides. When people over 21 do appear in the film, they are generally annoying authority figures, such as the female coach who subjects the young swimmers' armpits to shaving inspections, or the pervy male coaches who become aroused around the girls.

Water Lilies opens with orchestral music and shots of buff deltoids in the girls' locker room at the Piscine du Parvis, where skinny misfit Marie (Pauline Acquart) longs to be part of the indoor synchronized swim team captained by the conventionally gorgeous Floriane (Adèle Haenel). Outfitted in the universal baby dyke uniform of Levi's, old-school Nike basketball kicks, and a regrettably patterned polo shirt, Marie stares at the choreographed swimmers, wrapped in their glittery one-pieces, with the kind of single-minded attention that Adele Channing used to lavish on Jenny Schecter.

Alas, Marie and her friend Anne (Louise Blachère), a budding indie rocker of voluptuous proportions, inhabit the lower ranks of the teenage totem pole (or its French equivalent) in Cergy. Their bodies reveal their peripheral social positions and inadequate self-images: Plump Anne always waits until she is alone in the locker room to change, and flat-chested Marie removes her bra stealthily without taking off her shirt.

"I'm not normal," laments Marie to Anne near the beginning of the film as she hoists boxes of powdered laundry detergent to prime her twig-like biceps for the rigors of swimming. She even reveals that one arm is longer than the other.